As the size of managed forests increase, it is becoming cost prohibitive to physically survey or cruise such lands to gather data that is useful for forest management. As a solution, many forest management companies are turning to the use of remote sensing data such as aerial images or LiDAR data as a substitute to physically inspecting their lands. With LiDAR data, an aircraft, such an airplane or helicopter, is flown over the land while laser pulses are fired at the ground in a repetitive sweeping pattern. A detector on the aircraft measures the time and intensity of the pulses that are reflected from the underlying vegetation, ground etc. Because the altitude and speed of the aircraft are accurately known from GPS information recorded by the aircraft, each returned pulse can be assigned an accurate three-dimensional geographic coordinate. Together the returned LiDAR pulses define a topographic map of the heights of the vegetation or other objects under the aircraft.
While computers can identify trees in LiDAR data that are significantly taller than the surrounding vegetation, individual trees are harder to identify in the LiDAR data when the trees are young or about the same size as the surrounding vegetation. Given this problem, there is need for a technique that can better identify young trees from surrounding vegetation with remotely sensed data.